It's been 10 days now since the massive explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig off the Louisiana coast, and eight days have passed since what was left of the rig sank into the sea. Eleven oil rig workers are still missing and presumed dead. And the well, a mile below the water's surface, continues to spew 200,000 gallons of oil a day. (Every two days, that's enough liquid to fill up the outdoor Dolphin Bay tank at the Texas State Aquarium in Corpus Christi.)

The human tragedy and the potential environmental disaster inching toward the mouth of the Mississippi make some folks wonder: What role did the government play in this? Did it drop the ball?

Don’t let the Denver datelines fool you. The sleaze-soaked federal Interior Department office that grabbed headlines this week is actually in Colorado, but there was plenty of impropriety going on in Houston by workers with Uncle Sam’s Minerals Management Service.

Sadly, our favorite bit of tawdriness in the scandal –- the one that involved a federal official snorting crystal meth off a toaster oven –- took place near the Mile High City, as best we can tell from reading the three special reports issued this week by the Interior Department’s inspector general. But the reports say officials with the federal Minerals Management Service were selling influence, cutting insider deals, getting freebies and meals and who-knows-what-else in the Bayou City.

Funny, that’s not what they were supposed to be doing. They were supposed to be collecting money from Big Oil on behalf of the taxpayers.

And not surprisingly, many of the petroleum-related firms giving the freebies and meals are based in Houston or do substantial business in the unofficial oil-and-gas capital of the world.

The specific office of the MMS that gave us the toaster-meth scene was one that is tasked with collecting government royalities from oil firms for the products they bring up from the ground. But meth-snorting in one unit certainly doesn't reflect well on the MMS as a whole.

The scandal involved sex, drugs and (quite literally) sleeping with the very industry it was regulating. Here’s how The New York Times summarized [5] the government’s investigation:

The investigation also concluded that several of the officials “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.” The investigation separately found that the program’s manager mixed official and personal business. In sometimes lurid detail, the report also accuses him of having intimate relations with two subordinates, one of whom regularly sold him cocaine.

Hitting particularly hard on the government dropping the ball is POGO, the Project on Government Oversight in Washington. (POGO is particularly critical of the cozy relationships between government and private industry -- whether it's government and contractors or government and firms it is supposed to regulate.) They've questioned the cost of the spill to taxpayers and pointed to a recent report by the Government Accounting Office "that showed that the Interior Department struggles to effectively inspect federal leases — and has for a long time. This is part of a culture that prioritized production, and it's worth asking whether this oil spill is a preventable consequence of that culture."

In another post, POGO points out that that MMS thought Deepwater Horizon was safe enough to be given a safety award and asked, "Does it matter that BP opposed stricter safety rules for offshore drilling? Or that Food and Water Watch has raised concerns about the potential for a similar disaster, based on the allegations of 'a whistleblower and former company contractor' that another platform "'has been operating without a large percentage of the engineer-approved documents needed for it to operate safely'"?

You can see more about the relationship between the oil and gas industry and federal politicians at OpenSecrets.org, the Web site of the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. You can see their totals for oil-and-gas lobbying and also search for campaign contributions by employees of BP and TransOcean (though searching for TransOcean will also find many donors who reported being employees of the TransOceanic Cable Ship Co.)

I predict the cost to taxpayers will become more of an issue as more of the spill reaches the shoreline and if we see major environmental damage or harm done to small businesses, such as commercial fishing on the Gulf Coast. The progressive South Texas Chisme blog says, "BP expects us to clean up their mess," while Clear Lake Democratic activist John Cobarruvias of the Bay Area Houston blog says BP will have to "pay, baby, pay." Meanwhile, the AP reports -- spotted via the Dallas Morning News -- that the federal government, including the Coast Guard and now the Defense Department, have stepped up their involvement in the spill after learning that the well was leaking five times as much as BP originally told them.

"Clear Lake Democratic activist John Cobarruvias of the Bay Area Houston blog says BP will have to 'pay, baby, pay.'"

Cobarruvias recently served a six-month suspension for illegally using his government job to raise money for a state House candidate. If you want to stamp out corruption in government agencies, he's probably not the guy to see.

You mentioned the Center for Responsive Politics. Here's a really excellent article they wrote about BP's involvement with politics. http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2010/04/on-thursday-oil-giant-bp.html

kevin whited

Monday, 05/03/2010 - 06:38AM

Hard to argue with your Friday commenter. LOL Some voices of outrage are more credible than others.

Is there some reason why the names of the commenters are not displayed?

Tuesday, 05/04/2010 - 11:10AM

In simple terms BP hired Transocean to drill a big hole. Whatever went wrong is for Transocean to explain, they were the ones doing the actual drilling. And although they're registered as Swiss Transocean are an American company. The people blaming BP should get their facts right.

thursday 6-3-2010

Thursday, 06/03/2010 - 10:56AM

All Americans are to blame, because we sit back and dare to think our government is honest and fair. Why in your right mind would you allow deep water drilling that can't be fixed IF IT BROKE, shame shame shame on all of you! Untold amt.s of animals are chocking to death right NOW! Whats the punishment for wrecklesly causing the death of millions of animals. God help us the world is run by money hungry back stabbing college educated idiots! If the experts say it will take 30 yrs. to clean it up then that should be the amount of their prison sentence, plus the entire cost of the clean up.